Lantern Slides
by GodOfImagination98
Summary: In every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there. -Philip Pullman-
1. Chapter 1

In every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there.

As for why I call these little pieces lantern slides, it's because I remember the wooden boxes my grandfather used to have, each one packed neatly with painted glass slides showing scenes from Bible stories or fairy tales or ghost stories or comic little plays with absurd-looking figures. From time to time he would get out the heavy old magic lantern and project some of these pictures on to a screen as we sat in the darkened room with the smell of hot metal and watched one scene succeed another, trying to make sense of the narrative and wondering what St. Paul was doing in the story of Little Red Riding Hood—because they never came out of the box in quite the right order.

– Philip Pullman

* * *

Haku walking out onto the red bridge of the bathhouse. He doesn't know what made him come here; It seemed like a perfect idea at the time. The sun starts to dive beneath the horizon, the shadows lengthen, and he can sense the world dozing off, another one waking up; the second shift has begun. The train passes beneath him, and he stares at it blankly. As it clatters off into the distance, the sound of running feet reaches his ears. He looks up, and it is like the moment the orchestra has finished tuning and the perfect harmony is played for a fraction of a second before stopping abruptly at the flick of the conductor's baton. He hears it played in his mind.

_Chihiro._

* * *

He likes to have his rice with a sprinkle of tea leaves, to yarn with Kamaji, to bug Yubaba out of her enormous bun, and to go fishing with Haku on sunny days. That is, when he has any time to do these things, which he doesn't. The old building, which gets older every day, requires attention more than anything. The Elevators rattle and creak like an old man's joints, the lights keep flicking in and out like ancient rheumy eyes no matter how many times he replaces the lamps, the infinite matrix of pipework always leaking and rusting. But he loves his job, his life, all the same.

"It's strange," He says to Haku one day, after drifting lazily together for a while in their small boat, on the ocean that had once been a swamp.

"What?"

"The building...she seems to...repair herself? How should I describe it...As if I know I have to fix something, and I set out to fix it, and when I get there it's fixed. But I don't remember going near it at the time, and the others didn't see me there either."

Haku raises his eyebrows. "You don't know?"

"What?"

"You're-"

And before he said it, he realized that he had become the god of the bathhouse.

* * *

Sometimes, he flicks his head and frowns into the distance, tense and focused. Like a cat, she observed. Except he doesn't flick his ears along with his gaze.

* * *

The Ogino's Audi Quattro. It was two or so years old, and experienced quite a rough birth into existence; Chihiro's father was whimsical but determined to stay true to his whims. If you asked it what it was doing sitting , forsaken, in front of a two-faced stone gargoyle in the middle of the woods, gathering leaves and dust, it would say that it was waiting for the pigs to come back with their piglet.

* * *

Later, Chihiro remembered his scales were not quite mother-of-pearl, and she would quickly modify what she had been reading: from _mother-of-pearl _to _not-quite-mother-of-pearl. _

One of the children raised his hand. "But, Ba-chan, um, it's mother-of-pearl in the book."

She smiled and patted his head. "I know. But it wasn't quite that, so I improvised."

He tilted his head. "Improvised?" A perfect echo.

She laughed. "It's the difference between life and its plans, child."


	2. Chapter 2

'Well,' He thought.

He leaned back against the moth-covered frog and watched her run down the hill. Her parents were calling her from the doorway of the building.

She was running, sliding down the scree. Her parents called to her from the red building, waving their hands.

Wait.

That's not the same building they came through to get here.

He jumped up, tried to run, pumping his legs furiously. But he couldn't break the contract, the leash held.

She had stopped, almost turned around. He gritted his teeth and struggled harder, clawing vainly at thin air, his head echoing with, 'no, no, stop, wait, come back,!'

"Chihiro!"

She ran to her mother's side, and they walked. Further and further away from him. Further. Further. Further. Into the tunnel.

They were out of the tunnel. She turned back one last time and stared at the tunnel entrance, covered with ivy, not plaster. Hadn't she left something behind? She tried to remember, but it was getting harder. Fading. Trying to hold on to the precipice over oblivion. But he saw a rope. His movements amplified, his feet scratching the stone, wearing down his sandals, his arms straining toward the exit, the _wrong_ exit! 'It's the wrong exit!' He screamed at her, and he couldn't tell if he had actually said it or it was just one of the many echoes reverberating painfully in his head.

"Chihiro! Come on!"

The rope was gone. She let go.

He fell.

That was how Lin found him later in the afternoon, slumped against the moth-covered frog.

* * *

speaking of Lin, where had she gone?

The foreman hadn't seen her since yesterday, the guests all shook their heads, kamaji grumbled something that suggested dissent. Her friends weren't aware of the fact that she was absent; floating grotesquely in a blackish sphere, they weren't aware of anything around them, as if they were under a spell. Yubaba had been 'away'. But they forgot about her after a few weeks, and everything went back to normal.

Chihiro saw a weasel the other day. She was sitting on the porch, munching on a tuna onigiri and reading a book when it scuttled to her side as if it knew her. She gave it a piece of her food, and it snatched it up happily. Now, it followed her wherever she went, all day until nighttime. Then, it was gone to who knows where.

'Must have gone to the spirit world.' She mused.


End file.
